Suspects Are Held in 2 Fires at Black Churches in the South

By STEPHEN LABATON

Published: June 11, 1996

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, June 10—
A 13-year-old white girl was charged today with setting fire to an old wooden sanctuary on the grounds of a black church last week in Charlotte, N.C., while Texas authorities said they had detained three suspects in the burning of of another black church Sunday night in Greenville, north of Dallas.

The developments in the two arson cases came as a group of Southern pastors and civil rights lawyers completed meetings in Washington where they pressed senior Clinton Administration officials to take more aggressive steps to solve a rash of arson attacks on black churches in recent months. The fires have terrorized communities, most of them rural, from Texas to Virginia.

About 30 pastors came to Washington, not only to seek help, but also to complain that they and their parishioners were being unduly harassed by law-enforcement officials, who they say have focused more on church members than on possible outside suspects.

A wave of fear and frustration has fallen over many communities in the South after the 32 arsons at black churches in the last 18 months. Federal investigators say they do not believe most attacks have been coordinated, and until today the investigations into many had been fruitless. The investigators said they feared some more recent attacks could be copycat crimes.

The National Council of Churches announced today that it had begun a campaign to raise $2 million to rebuild churches destroyed by arson.

President Clinton continued today to elevate the importance of the arson investigations, denouncing the fires in a speech in San Diego, as he did in a radio address on Saturday.

He has vowed to mobilize Federal resources to find the arsonists, recently ordering scores of agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to assist local police departments investigating the attacks in nine southern states. Officials said a new telephone hotline for tips about the arsons had received more than 300 telephone calls since it was installed over the weekend. The nationwide number is (888)ATF-FIRE (283-3473).

Aides to Mr. Clinton said he would travel this week to one destroyed church, the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville, S.C..

Officials in North Carolina today attributed a fire at the Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church in Charlotte to a 13-year-old girl who they said would be tried in juvenile court.

Investigators refused to provide the identify or motive of the girl, who they said was a resident of Charlotte, although one said she had confessed to setting the fire. They said they believed that she had acted alone, used material that she found in the 93-year-old white clapboard building and had not been involved in other church fires.

"Personally I feel a deep sense of sorrow for a 13-year-old child not only because she ruined a church building but that she may also have ruined her life," said Larry Hill, pastor of Matthews-Murkland.

Larry Snider, the deputy chief of police in Charlotte, said the suspect was "a very troubled 13-year-old." Other officials said there was no evidence that the fire had been motivated by racial animus.

In Greenville, Tex., about 40 miles northeast of Dallas, police officers questioned two white men and a Hispanic companion as suspects in a fire after 11 Sunday night at the New Light House of Prayer, a Baptist church whose sanctuary and classrooms were badly damaged. About 90 minutes after that fire, officers stopped a car that had been seen at the church earlier that evening. The three men in the car, Mark Gross, Juan Fernando Avila and Bradley Blankenship, were being held on alcohol-related charges.

A second black church about a mile away, the Church of the Living God, broke into flames at 4 A.M., today about three hours after the three suspects were taken into custody. It was less severely damaged than the first Greenville church.

Fire Chief Robert Wood said today that the two fires had been caused by "acts of local vandalism." Other authorities declined to say whether they believed the attacks were race-related. But city officials said the letters KKK had been spray painted on a wall at a car wash that was burglarized early Sunday morning.

Greenville has had a long history as a home to white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. "It's common knowledge that the K.K.K. is active in Greenville," said Red Johnson, a 36-year-old black man who lives six blocks away from the New Light House of Prayer.

In Washington, black church leaders and civil rights lawyers concluded two days of meetings with Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Attorney General Janet Reno. After the meetings, the pastors and lawyers said that they were generally satisfied with the Federal commitment to combatting arson, although some said the effort had come late, and others criticized the way they and their congregations were being treated by investigators.

Rose Johnson, the executive director of a non-profit group that researches racism, complained that after a fire at a church in Knoxville, Tenn., Federal agents "polygraphed pastors, fingerprinted church members, showed up unannounced at job sites and homes, and implied that church members burned their church."

Mr. Rubin acknowledged that some investigators may have been unfair to the congregations. "I have no doubt that there have been instances of insensitivity," he said after the meeting. "We must build trust."

Photo: Ministers from black churches that have been burned and members of the National Council of Churches leaving the Treasury Department yesterday after a meeting with Secretary Robert E. Rubin about the arson fires that have damaged or destroyed 32 churches in the last 18 months. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times)

Correction: June 15, 1996, Saturday An article on Tuesday about a campaign speech by President Clinton in San Diego misquoted a passage about immigration policy in some editions. Mr. Clinton said: "For a lot of years people in public life at election time talked tough about immigration, but didn't do much about it. We tried to change that. We tried to substitute deeds for words."